Staff Travel Blog
Travelling with a Disability

One of our team recently travelled to Boppard in Germany for a Rhine Xmas river cruise with Newmarket Holidays, it was interesting to see how a disabled person would cope with the 5 day trip by Coach, our staff member had informed his disability in advance, and part of the challenge was to see how the trip would go on an older River Cruise vessel.

For our readers - I would like to explain on most modern River Cruise Vessels still do not have accessible cabins, so we had a non accessible single cabin on an older ship to see the differences as we are often asked what the differences are between cheaper River Cruises and the more expensive ships. 

The reason for not having accessible cabins are mainly due to the way you have to get on and off the ships when docking, river cruise ships often moore next to each other, so you have to transfer from one ship to another over the sun deck which due to going under bridges do not have lift access, so a guest must be able to do some stairs, also depending on age there may or may not have a lift to other floors, corridors can be very narrow making using wheelchairs difficult.

We travelled on Ms Olympia owned by Duch Cruise Lines which doesn't have a lift,